On this day, April 4, 1964,
“Revelle had painted a similar picture of the CO2 problem before President Johnson’s Domestic Council a year earlier, and in 1964 he called for similarly bold action. “With the advance of science and technology,” he wrote, “our power to change nature has grown enormously both for good and for ill. …by gaining greater understanding, we will be able to make conscious changes—to bring more water to deserts, to bring cooler summers and warmer winters to the Middle West and the Northeast. In thinking about how we can make our country a better place in which to live by changing our environment, we must not be afraid of big things that can be done only on a national or international scale. We must be sure to make more than little plans.”
Joseph Fisher, Paul Freund, Margaret Mead, and Roger Revelle, “Notes Prepared by Working Group Five, White House Group on Domestic Affairs,” April 4, 1964, President’s Committee [White House Group on Domestic Affairs], File 42, Box 20, Roger Revelle Collection MC 6, Scripps Institute of Oceanography Archives, La Jolla, California.
Howe, J. 2010 MAKING GLOBAL WARMING GREEN: CLIMATE CHANGE AND AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM, 1957-1992
and
“PSAC was the second presidential task force to whom Revelle had introduced the issue of CO2. The first was a subgroup of President Johnson’s Domestic Council, which released a report in 1964. Joseph Fisher, Paul Freund, Margaret Mead and Roger Revelle., “Notes Prepared by Working Group Five, White House Group on Domestic Affairs,” April 4 1964.
(Howe, 2014:219)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Revelle had been aware of the potential problem of carbon dioxide build-up for almost a decade, and Dave Keeling had been taking accurate measurements at Mauna Loa for 6 years by now, with a steady increase…
What we can learn
Revelle was there, inside the bureaucracy, keeping the (potential) issue on the agenda…
What happened next
In 1965 Lyndon Johnson mentioned carbon dioxide build-up in his address to congress. The National Science Foundation kept doing work on weather modification and climate. Gordon Macdonald and Margaret Mead kept going on the topic…